Dangerous Ladies (48 page)

“She died a spinster,” Four said.

“The ultimate insult.” An offensive smile played around Devlin’s mouth. “If she’d married someone else, the Benjamins could claim she’d lost her mind for love. Instead, she preferred to work as her brother’s housekeeper—by all accounts, a thankless job—while he made his fortune shipping cotton to Britain.”

“He made his fortune in trade,” Four sneered.

“Yes, and the only difference between him and you is that he did it well.”

Four stood up, knocking over his glass.

Ice clattered across the table. Brown liquid rushed toward Devlin.

Devlin scrambled to his feet, but not fast enough to avoid a lap full of bourbon.

Meadow would have sworn he was ready to leap across the table and beat Four.

Then Four laughed.

The sound of that insolent amusement acted on Devlin as the ice cubes had not. His flush faded and his expression cooled. “How clumsy of you, Four.”

He wasn’t talking about the spilled drink.

“Okay!” Meadow stood up, too.

Four ran his gaze up her legs. “Nice.”

“Thank you.” Exasperated at the way he used her to get at Devlin, she used Four’s pride to get back at him. “And what a gentlemanly way of saying I look attractive.”

He flushed. “Point taken.”

“Make sure that it is.”

Devlin slid his hand around Meadow’s waist. “Let’s go change now, darling, and we’ll be on our way.”

“Of course, darling.” She fluttered her eyelashes at him. He didn’t seem nearly as smug about her outrageous outfit now. Apparently it was one thing for him to appreciate her figure, and quite another for Four, with his lascivious smile and his handsome face, to enjoy it. “After we clean up this mess.”

“I’ll call for a crew.” Devlin took the walkie-talkie off his belt.

“We can do it.” Meadow stacked the glasses onto the plate.

Devlin ignored her, giving orders to the housekeeper on the other end. When he finished, he gestured at the wet spot on his pants and said to her, “Let’s go.”

“You don’t need me to help you.” She did not want to go into that bedroom with him again. Not while he removed his pants. As Sharon always said, it was easier to shun temptation than to fight it.

“He’s not going to let you stay here alone with me. I might decide to avenge the insult to my ancestor by seducing Devlin’s wife.” Four thrust his hands in his pockets and grinned.

“What a jackass you are,” she said cordially.

“What did I say?” Four glanced at Devlin in honest bewilderment.

Devlin’s satisfaction couldn’t be denied. “I believe my wife just said she wouldn’t be seduced by a pretty face and a big ego.”

“You almost got it right.” Meadow pinched Devlin’s chin and smiled deliberately into his face. “
I
won’t be seduced
at all.
”

Devlin understood. He understood very well, but he didn’t accede. He stared back, answering her challenge.

Neither of them backed down. Nothing broke the silence.

Until the cleanup crew clattered out of the door and started toward them.

At the sign of discord between them, Four beamed. He opened his mouth to speak.

Meadow looked at him. Just looked at him.

He shut his mouth.

She approved Four’s common sense with a simple, “Good man.” To Devlin, she asked sarcastically, “Which of my flowered sundresses do you want me to wear?”

“Put on jeans,” Devlin directed.

“Jeans. What a good idea.” She’d won! She’d won! “I wish I’d thought of getting some jeans.”

Or had she won? If jeans were already in her room, he’d ordered them when he’d thrown away her burglar outfit, and all that talk about only flowered sundresses was simply nonsense.

She didn’t understand what drove Devlin—what he wanted with her, why he lied to Four, what he intended with his elaborate charade. She knew while she donned her outfit only that whatever it was she decided to wear, she would lock the door.

It was simply safer.

A
melia Shores was a town of four thousand in the off-season and twelve thousand during the tourist season. Right now, in the spring, the bed-and-breakfasts had been freshly painted, Wendy’s and Mc-Donald’s were hiring smiling faces, and the restaurants along Waterfront Row rolled out their striped canopies to cover their outdoor tables.

A few tourists were already there.

The hordes were coming.

As they wandered along the sidewalk, the Atlantic on one side and the street on the other, Four told Meadow, “The shops are gearing up for the high season, so before the tourists get here the regulars come down to D’Anna’s for lunch and stay for a leisurely dessert, coffee, and gossip.”

“Who are the regulars?” Her head swiveled between the beach and the shore. She’d never visited the East Coast, but no matter their location, coastal towns shared common sights and smells. Waves curled, and sunbathers wiped sand off their lotion-damp skin. Shops advertised with bright bikinis and intricate kites hung in the windows. Tourists traipsed along Waterfront Row in cover-ups donned too late to protect against the sunburn that seared their shoulders.

She didn’t fit in; in a fit of rebellion against Devlin she had donned a silk flowered sundress and strappy yellow sandals, and now the breeze played with the edge of her skirt, and she had to use her hand to keep her wide-brimmed straw hat on her head.

“The regulars are people who live here.” Four waved at a shop-keeper. “The people who work here.”

“The regulars are the old farts who used to own the whole town and still control the city council.” Devlin walked behind them, and his words were so at odds with his unemotional tone that Meadow turned and walked backward to stare at him.

He wore faded jeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He looked like a construction worker—except for his darkly sardonic eyes, which watched her with such intensity.

Could he see through her sundress? But no; the halter and skirt were lined, the hem reached midcalf, and he might not have been happy that she defied his instructions about the jeans, but he openly appreciated the smooth line of her shoulders and throat.

“You don’t like the old farts,” she said.

“They want to halt the march of time,” he answered.

“And you
are
the march of time,” she guessed.

“He’s like an army battalion tromping through a flower garden. He leaves nothing in his path.” She heard a sour note in Four’s voice. “You’re going to trip.” Four caught her arm and turned her forward.

“If you didn’t want to sell Waldemar to Devlin, why did you do it?” she asked.

Four did trip on a crack on the sidewalk, and when he righted himself she saw that some of his charm had eroded like gold vermeil off well-worn silver.

“Four didn’t sell the house to me,” Devlin said. “His father did.”

“Over my objections.” Four looked toward the restaurant perched on the highest spot on the street. There uniformed waiters moved among the outdoor tables carrying bottles of sparkling water, and the fringe on the large round umbrellas fluttered in the breeze.

“He had no choice.” Devlin continued his barrage on Four’s dignity. “I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

“Are you the Godfather?” Meadow laughed, then realized that Four’s cheeks were ruddy with fury and Devlin was smiling that hateful smile. They were ready to come to blows again.

“He has aspirations,” Four said grimly.

“Yet my ambitions are thoroughly crushed. The original Godfather of Amelia Shores isn’t ready to step aside yet.” Devlin indicated the group of gentlemen who sat along the metal railing, watching the street. “That’s his father up there.”

Meadow stopped still in the street and looked up. From across and down the street, they looked too similar to tell apart—five older men dressed in tasteful, expensive leisure clothing and sipping aperitifs from tall glasses. “Which one is he?”

She tried not to sound too intense, too interested.

She doubted that she had succeeded.

Four stopped with her. “Left to right—Wilfred Kistard, toupee, and a crusty old gentleman with a kind heart. Penn Sample, bald, portly, ear hair, twinkling blue eyes that hide a shrewd brain. He’s the one who thought of cutting Devlin’s local supplies to the hotel.”

“Did he?” Devlin didn’t appear particularly worried.

But Meadow was learning a lot about Devlin, and she knew that as of this moment, if Penn Sample were drowning and going under for the last time, Devlin would throw him an anchor.

“H. Edwin Osgood. Never married, lives alone in his mansion—not a bit of trouble making his payments, I can tell you—and fancies himself quite the ladies’ man. Hair color for men. Bow tie and thick glasses. He’s my father’s sycophant.” Four grimaced. “’Nuff said. Scrubby Gallagher, thinning white hair. He’s my godfather, the oldest, and the only one of the bunch who’s ever lived anywhere besides Charleston and here.”

Meadow had been raised in her parents’ art studio outside the small town of Blythe in the Cascade Mountains in Washington. She’d attended college at Stanford in California. She’d spent a semester
in Rome taking classes and living with an Italian family. She was only twenty-two—and these old guys had never lived anywhere else? She couldn’t imagine being so confined in her mind and heart. “Where did he live?”

“Atlanta.”

She laughed briefly.

Four laughed with her. “Yes, quite a change of pace. His experience broadened his world scope—a profound character defect—and that’s why the others pay him so little heed.” He looked sideways at Devlin. “And it’s the reason he’s forward-thinking enough to invest in Devlin’s hotel.”

Devlin studied Four. “How did you know that?”

“I only suspected until this minute.” Four smirked so obnoxiously, Meadow wondered that Devlin didn’t hit him.

Four was smart; he’d figured out something Meadow knew must be so secret only Devlin and Scrubby Gallagher knew. Yet so stupid; he had to taunt Devlin with his sly intelligence.

One of the gentlemen, the one with the whitest hair, waved.

She waved back.

Four didn’t. “That’s him. That’s my father. He’s only made two mistakes in his life—all the women he married, and all the children he fathered.”

“Really?” Meadow considered Four. “How many wives and children has he had?”

“Four wives. One child. Me.” Four pulled a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit it with a match, protecting the flame from the ocean breeze with his body and his hand.

“Four wives.” She had had no idea. “Did all the marriages end in divorce?”

“All,” Four confirmed. “Three of them—number two, number three, and number four—cited mental cruelty. He’s an indifferent old prick.”

“And the first wife?” she asked.

“He divorced her, citing irreconcilable differences.” Four chuckled,
amused and ashamed by his amusement. “Actually, it was infidelity.”

“Really?” She watched Four.

Devlin watched her.

“Mind you, this was before my time, but from what I’ve managed to gather, Isabelle was a beauty. Not appropriate, of course. Not one of our class.”

“Shocking!” Meadow said.

“For my father it was. He must have been mad for her. She was fooling around with her art teacher, and when the old man confronted her, she admitted it without a bit of shame. He threw her out, of course, and the baby with her.” Four shook his head. “Cold as ice. Apparently the kid was only a couple of months old, and Isabelle had no funds and nowhere to go.”

“She had a baby?” Meadow’s skin should have been warm in the sun. Instead a chill worked its way along her nerves.

“My closest shot at a sibling—except she was fathered by the lover.” He flicked his ashes into the wind. “I wish she hadn’t been. She might have taken some of the expectations off me.”

“Not likely,” Devlin said. “He doesn’t expect much of a woman.”

“He expects them to be decorative.” Four’s gaze swept Meadow, not insultingly as before, but appraisingly. “He’ll approve of you.”

“You can imagine my relief,” she said coolly.

“He’ll like that air, too. He detests a woman who’s demonstrative about her feelings. In fact, he’s not fond of feelings at all.”

“Because the one time he gave in to his own, his wife betrayed him.” Meadow looked between the two men’s surprised faces. “Honestly, don’t you guys ever think of this stuff ?”

“Don’t you gals ever think of anything else?” Devlin countered.

In a flash of irritation, she said, “On occasion, but we
gals
have our priorities right. Family and feelings first.”

“Except Isabelle.” Devlin lifted Meadow’s hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers. “Isabelle didn’t think of her family and their feelings when she had that affair.”